Really, you don't know anyone who uses Fortran? I use Fortran, and I was under the impression that it was still the primary language for computationally intensive simulations and modeling. Outside of the science community, it's definitely not used, and C++ and Java are much more popular.

Perhaps it is true that Fortran is no longer used in experimental particle physics. But I know that it is still commonly used in many areas of science, such as molecular modeling, quantum chemistry, climate modeling, etc. because Fortran programs run faster than those written in C or C++, and in these types of simulations, speed is more important than whatever advantages C or C++ have. Plus, Fortran has historically been the primary language for these purposes, and there is a lot of old programming still in use.

I'll have to disagree with you twistor. I use FORTRAN right now in my research, and I also have a lot of experience with Java, C, and C++. If you want to do numerical computing, FORTRAN beats these languages hands down. Newer versions, like 2003, have objects, pointers, and all that other stuff if you need it. I read somewhere that AMD and Intel still use FORTRAN code to benchmark the floating point performance of their new processors.

The bottom line is there is no one language that's suited to all tasks. I would never write an operating system in FORTRAN, and I would never do numerical computing in Java, etc. Different tools for different tasks, and FORTRAN is still the best tool around for some of these tasks.

Last edited by fermiboy on Wed Dec 12, 2007 11:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I didn't think it was still widely used. Maybe it's worth learning then. I have an ancient (1986) book on scientific computing where most of the examples are written in Fortran. I figured it was hopelessly outdated. It also has examples in Pascal, but I think we can all agree that Pascal's time has come and gone....

I'll agree with you about Pascal. The Pascal of today is Java. It is a common misconception that FORTRAN is no longer in use. I thought so until my adviser told me to learn it. I discovered that not only is it still in use, they are still making new versions, 2003 was the last, and 2008 is in the works. The newer versions don't have all the archaic syntax like FORTRAN 77 and before. I have grown to really appreciate it's use for numerical stuff, especially if you want a small program to do something like a finite difference method. Plus in addition to integers and floats, it has an intrinsic complex number data type, how cool is that?

I am currently learning lisp even though I am pretty sure no one outside of computer science (AI, specifically) uses it. Its a really interesting language and it changes the way you think about programming. Its about half as fast as C++, which is not that bad, but for numerics you might want to stick to C++ or fortran, even though personally I think learning lisp is worth it for the cool factor.

Oh, and talking about old, I believe it has been 50+ years since lisp was invented.

Python with NumPy is also getting to be pretty widely used by younger professors who do numerics. Yes fortran comes out with new versions, but the people that really use fortran use fortran 77. And you should definitely learn it, it's not so bad.

If you're really interested in programming though, outside of just numerics, Python is awesome.